Science counts five senses, and Balachandran V's "A Sense of Time" opens by calling that count silly. The jab sets up the poem's whole argument: some of the things we feel most strongly, such as pain, the weight of memory, and the passing of time, belong to no single organ. The first stanza even plays with the word itself. "Sense," "insensitive" and "censure" echo one another, so that science seems to be scolding the very thing it cannot measure. Beyond the dateline (Kottayam, 30.06.2005), nothing is supplied about how the poem came to be, so everything here is read from the words.
What follows is physical and almost comic in its desperation. The speaker screws up their eyes, turns their head, and clamps their lips "trying to shut in momentarily." The adverbs of that stanza (tightly, abruptly, firmly, momentarily) chime with one another, a near-rhyme in a poem that otherwise uses none. The grammar then buckles: "Would it, please, go away / Images, sounds, the smells." The thing begged away arrives only after the plea, as if the speaker cannot keep a sentence in order while memories flood in. That flood is the unlisted sixth sense.
The poem's central claim comes next: time lives only in the mind, as "facts of past and fictions of future." The phrase is neat, since the past is what we believe happened and the future is what we invent. It follows that time "stands still only for those / Who cannot remember anymore." The poem then gives that idea a face. Judging by the capitalised "Disease" and the mother's wide, staring eyes, she has lost her memory to an illness, though the poem never names it. A list built on repetition tells us what she has lost: "What it was like to feel the wind… to smell the flowers… to watch the dawn." The pattern is plain until the last line, "to love and be loved," where the senses give way to the heart. The stanza before it ends on "Who cannot remember anymore," and the next stanza begins with the same words, like an echo the mind cannot stop.
The poem's tenderest turn comes when the speaker addresses the mother directly. They ask her to recall holding a baby: the "softness of my cheeks," the "gurgling laughter," "my fingers gripping yours." These are questions she cannot answer, so the speaker must remember for both of them. The contrast of eyes sharpens this. The speaker's are "squeezed tight" against too much memory, while the mother's are "wide open," staring at a "nothingness / That waited, patiently, by your bed." Nothingness becomes a polite, patient visitor, and the waiting runs through the poem: the speaker's time "pauses… waiting for oblivion," and the mother "wait[s] for the next" wave.
One stanza lets in light. At twilight, "when shadows danced in and out," the mother kisses the speaker's hand and looks at them. Memory "flitted like moonlight / From behind the coconut fronds." The simile suits the moment, since moonlight through moving leaves comes and goes. The coconut fronds also give the scene a warm, local setting that fits the Kottayam dateline, though that link is an inference.
The ending reverses the poem's opening scene. The mother once lifted the child, and now the child will "lift you up / For once, first and the very last time." That last phrase is deliberately impossible, since something cannot be both "for once" and "first and last" unless the whole of a lifetime's love is being packed into one gesture. The refrain about science then returns, sharper than before. Science "limit[s] us to the obvious / When waves crash and shatter all," and the poem ends on the mother whimpering and waiting, with no comfort offered.
The poem is significant because it rests on plain speech, free verse and repetition, with no ornament to hide behind. Its argument is philosophical, but its force is emotional. If time is memory, the child who remembers carries time for them both.